TL;DR Breakdown:
- Ethereum billionaires are buying more ETH at the dip.
- In six months, these whale addresses accumulated 2.2 percent more of the supply.
- Ethereum 2.0 is expected to launch soon.
At the current price of $2,521, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, Ether (ETH), is trading over 48 percent below the all-time high – $4,891 in November 2021. Despite the price correction, the supply held by Ethereum billionaire addresses remains high.
Ethereum billionaire supply up 2.2%
On-chain metrics platform Santiment reported Monday that Ethereum billionaire (addresses holding between 1m to 10m ETH) supply has been high since the past six months. These addresses account for more than 21 percent of all ETH in circulation.
About 2.2 percent of the supply was raised in six months, indicating that Ethereum billionaires are buying more ETH even as the price dropped.
ETH is down 3.77 percent on the seven-day chart, with the market capitalization now at $303.4 billion. Since March, ETH has been struggling to reclaim the $3,000 mark amidst the bear market fueled by the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
But Ethereum still dominates the DeFi space by total address count. Coin98 Analytics recently reported that Ethereum addresses have increased by four percent since January, followed by BNB Chain and Polygon.
Ethereum 2.0 launches soon
In other news, Ethereum 2.0 is likely months away from launch, as the co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently confirmed that proof-of-stake has been successfully deployed on the testnets.
A total of 9,796,878 ETH – equivalent to $24.6 billion – has been staked on Ethereum 2.0 deposit contracts, raising the number of active validators on the network to 306,155 at publication time, according to Beaconcha.in. These coins remain illiquid until Ethereum 2.0 launches.
Ethereum 2.0 terminates the need for miners to validate ETH transactions, and it is expected to add more scalability to the network. “I expect ethereum’s move to proof-of-stake to have a positive impact on price in the long term,” says Marcus Sotiriou, GlobalBlock analyst.
